


The Sweetness of Dew

by song_of_orpheus



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (which is sad), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff I guess, Gen, Les Mis Trans Week 2018, Lots and lots of cats, Mentions of Violence, Montparnasse is a ridiculous man, Reference to death, Some Swearing, Trans Bonding, bonding over Bad Stuff, cuddle free though, mentions of transphobia, minor injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-14 03:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16032173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/song_of_orpheus/pseuds/song_of_orpheus
Summary: Mabeuf is a sweetheart who owns a bookshop and collects stories. He meets a charming and devillish young man on his doorstep. They talk, there are cats and tea and it's rather wholesome.Written for Les Mis Trans Week 2018





	The Sweetness of Dew

In a city at the edge of the world – which is to say, in Paris – there lives an old man who’s known as a story-keeper. He is a creature of gentle adorations: in the morning, he watches the molten steel sunrise spill gently over the roofs and lets breath chatter from his lips at the sight; he falls to raptures to see flowers pierce the city’s bleak tattoo; he cherishes the greatest and loneliest of stories most of all. Stories for him are offered by strangers in exchange for a meal or company or a book. Not all of them are true.

 

His name is Father Mabeuf.

 

Gazing out on one such morning from his rooms in the attic, he notes the lemon curd of the sky just above the roof opposite, and muses on the rosiness Homer spoke of. The curtains are old and spiderweb-thin against his shoulders, so the light swims along his skin. His hair curls into a white rose above his ears, and his face is made of soft planes turned even softer by age.

 

Tugging on a cotton dressing gown, he steps downstairs barefooted, muttering a song to himself. Whether it’s a hymn or a nursery rhyme or a dream, it’s hard to tell.

 

The books flutter gently as he passes by, wrinkled fingers shifting over the spines, different sections tumbling into each other – East European Folklore; Handweaving, Lacemaking and Crochet; Ghost Stories. His knuckles are ribbed by dark veins stretching out like willow branches as he greets them. Steps creaking, he finds the light switch for the ground floor and the bulbs crack once and twice before they turn on steadily. The light trembles multicoloured through the room, slipping away as it meets the soft dawnlight through the large front windows.

 

The kitchen at the back of the shop is small and cramped, but it blossoms with the smell of spices. Flicking the hob on and setting a kettle of water on it, he takes a croissant from the fridge and bites into it delicately before pushing the back door open with his shoulder, where it springs out into the alleyway.

 

A yell tears at the air just in front of him, and there’s a knife at his throat before his pulse even has time to speed up. The croissant drops limply from his lips.

 

Holding the knife is a man taller than Mabeuf, with black feathered hair drooping along his cheekbones and vodka-pale eyes splintered with mascara. There’s a half-flush running carnation-red down his face, and what could be wine on his breath and stained at the corners of his mouth. He must have been sleeping on the doorstep – there’s dew singed on his hair. He’s young too, Mabeuf notices, and dreams for a moment of his own youth, all that love and hardship, all those feverish dreams and loves-

 

“Who the fuck are you?” the young man asks him, face sharpening from its initial wildness.

 

“Good morning,” Mabeuf says, with a minute sigh as he gazes down at the dropped pastry. He thinks about reaching out for it for a moment but decides it’s not worth it. Besides, he only has one, and there are two people now. “I’m father Mabeuf. I own this shop. Are you lost? What’s your name?”

 

“Montparnasse,” he says, then shakes his head and snarls.

 

Montparnasse suddenly retreats, pulls the knife away with a grunt, and starts cursing in the rapid argot of the streets. Mabeuf is entranced by the lexical possibilities – he mixes slang from all areas of Paris and more from other places. Berlin, perhaps? Maybe even a little of Amsterdam. He’s too distracted to catch most of what he’s talking about, of course, but there’s a show of new Dutch carnations next week in Amsterdam he’s excited to hear about-

 

“Are you calling the cops on me or what?” Montparnasse asks, looking obviously disconcerted. Mabeuf realises he likely doesn’t even remember arriving here last night, and he must have an awful headache. There are stains on his knuckles like split cherries, and bruises creeping up his chin. Where is the ice pack, anyway?

 

“You should come in,” he says plainly. He seems a charming young man, and this is a difficult place to navigate even if you know your way around Paris very well. Besides, Mabeuf wouldn’t wish for anyone to stay outside after a night on the streets. “You _did_ ruin my croissant, after all.”

 

Montparnasse gazes at him in flickering crimson, then shrugs. He keeps the knife perched between his fingers, and his eyes brush across all of the insides of the building that he can see. It seems safe, of course, and he’s heart this old man’s no trouble. He figures it must be easier to please him for a little while than have the police called. Maybe he’ll even get some nice trinkets out of it.

 

Fuck the old man’s reactions. Fuck himself for sleeping on a doorstep of all things. He’s sure his shirt is creased to all hell.

 

“How did you get here, dear?” Mabeuf asks, drifting back inside to reach into cupboards and pull out things Montparnasse can’t see and _doesn’t want to._ Montparnasse follows with silent footsteps even in his heels. There are lemon trees by the door, and the room looks positively cosy. He despises it instantly.

 

“I walked.” His voice comes out sharp and low – purposefully low – like the growl of sunset. It feels uncomfortable in the morning; everything is too light and bright and sickly pale.

 

“Would you like some tea the, Montparnasse?” Mabeuf asks gently, his slippered feet spinning across the floor tiles in patterns, humming something again.

 

Montparnasse doesn’t respond and stands behind the kitchen table like some wonderfully-dressed goth scarecrow. His coat trails on the old wooden furniture – honestly, it’s even painted with flowers – and he sneers as much as he possibly can. Mabeuf probably sees it, but he just sets a mug of milky tea on the table in front of him, then opens up a cupboard. Sniffing exaggeratedly, Montparnasse sits upon the very edge of the chair, the image of spiteful decorum. He’s about to jest at the old man for serving day-old bread when he could obviously buy some from the boulangerie next door when he realises that it isn’t a bread cupboard.

 

All too late, he notices the row of small mismatched bowls by the back door, and the empty bottles of milk he’d been sleeping next to, and -

 

Oh, _no._

 

The first one arrives in the doorway like a small fluffy orange gremlin with bright yellow eyes. Its ears twitch before heading towards Mabeuf’s grinning self and wraps a large bushy tail around his ankles before making a beeline for the cacophony of bowls. Montparnasse can feel his soul leave his body. Perhaps he died last night, and this is Hell. No, no, _no._

 

More cats arrive in the doorway and he resigns himself to his fate. They flit around over the wooden floor – he’s not sure how many but it’s _too many_ – and he’s suddenly glad he sat down. Mabeuf sits opposite him, an oasis of peace within the feline chaos, and pushes a small pastry – grizzada - towards him next to the tea.

 

“I have coffee if you’d prefer,” he says, voice blurred by sleep and age to impossible gentleness.

 

“No, thanks,” Montparnasse says and taps the handle of his mug with practised nonchalance. “Why am I in here?”

 

“You were sleeping on my doorstep,” he says, and Montparnasse tries and fails not to roll his eyes. Mabeuf doesn’t comment on it. “People rarely do so when they’re happy.”

 

“What’s it to you?”

 

This makes Mabeuf take a breath, slowly, and he turns to look at the patterns of sunlight on the window before speaking. “Stories are my trade,” he says, and there’s a starlight smile in his eyes, so dark they’re black. “You need food and shelter, obviously. I’ll give you however much or little you want, but I’d like a story first.”

 

“Shit, you want me to spill my heart out to you? I’m not some bleeding-heart charity case, fucker.” He’s angry now, mouth turned to steel. He remembers the hate of the streets, the hate of all the old men he’s known who despised him for what he was.

 

With a crackle, he sends the mug of hot tea spinning to the floor, and it shatters furiously. The cats who are still here scamper away, and he tenses up. He’s not usually so clumsy. The shards scatter bleakly, and he thinks of cliffs that wreck ships in the stories, of the knives kept close to him always, of violence and hate and-

 

“Oh dear,” Mabeuf looks a little sad, then stands and shoos the cats away to fetch a towel. When he speaks, it’s with the same kindness he’s shown the whole time Montparnasse has been here. “I’ll clear it up, don’t worry. The exercise is good for me.”

 

And he does. Carefully, minding Montparnasse’s feet which have stayed crossed at the ankles since he sat down. Eventually, he’s gathered up all the shards, thrown them away and mopped up the tea. Montparnasse blinks slowly and awkwardly. He doesn’t question it, though. Questioning what you’re given for free is usually a bad idea.

 

The cats are licking the floor where the tea was. No taste at all.

 

“No,” Mabeuf says when he sits down again, and brushes a crumb off the corner of his lip. “I’m not asking you to bear your soul to me. But I’m a stranger and you’ve got time enough to eat and drink and speak. I’d like an explanation if you want to give one.”

 

His softness makes Montparnasse angry again. What would he know of the streets, of crime, of fury and steel and bullets? What would he care about him if he knew what they called him? Bone-pale moonlight shifts across his face despite the dawn – to spite the dawn itself probably, for he’s a man of spite if nothing else – and his words curdle bloody on his tongue.

 

“I’m a fucking queer and they fucking hate me for being fucking trans.” Words battered to lie on the table. Mabeuf looks at them and nods steadily. “That good enough a sob story for you, old man?”

 

He doesn’t reply quickly, and Montparnasse feels his face burn up in his gaze. He imagines the cinders flecking his cheeks and nose, smearing across the painted claret of his lips, settling in the hollows of his collarbones.

 

Mabeuf feels like his opposite – everything about him radiates gentle warmth, from the rich black of his skin to the roundness of his body to his words and a gaze that seems so fucking _innocent._ It’s like he's never seen a gun. Time measured out carefully, he sips at his tea for a few more moments, and Montparnasse almost leaves. Almost breaks another mug, on purpose this time – was it on purpose before? - almost rams his hand into the door on the way out. He’s waiting for Mabeuf to react, to spit at him and call him slurs. He’s so used to hate, he needs to get it over with.

 

“Then you’re like me, in however small a way,” Mabeuf says, painfully measured. It feels like the words are pulled tight from his belly, hot and sharp, but he knows how powerful they are, how important it is to hear. “A lot of people have hated me for being transgender over the years. For being Black. Especially when I was your age.” As he speaks, a large cat jumps onto his lap, and he strokes it cherishingly.

 

Montparnasse doesn’t gasp. He knows better than that, but that doesn’t mean his eyelids don’t open a little more than usual. With a strike, he remembers the steady moonlike gaze Mabeuf held even with a knife to his throat.

 

Not so innocent, after all.

 

“They used to hurt me a lot, they used to try to even more. It was hard, of course – my parents dropped me when they realised I was queer,” he begins, smile taut but gentle. It was a different century, of course. I was Black and transsexual and not even straight. Transition was a nightmare. I lost a lot of people – some who started breeding hate and some who were killed by it. The government did nothing.”

 

Mabeuf cups his palms around the mug and rests them there, and suddenly the overwhelming scent of the lemon trees by the doorway to the shop turns sour. Faded agonies of scars drift across his skin. His nose is cracked, eyes bleary and rimmed with crescent glasses. A single earring – a cross, old and with the silver coating patchy. Even the air, sweetened by the strawberries flowing out at the windows and the books in the shop in front and the _cat hair_ which Montparnasse is trying not to think about, seems colder than it was.

 

“So you hide it?” he asks, anger molten into something else. It’s not necessarily gentler; he doesn’t do gentle. But it’s more even and less furious.

 

“Not exactly,” Mabeuf says, smiling down at the table. He’s breathing slowly, the scattered pages of his heart fluttering back into place. “Maybe a little. But this is my kind of survival, I think. A bookshop and cats and loving what I am able to.”

 

Montparnasse lets himself sneer at that, but there’s no intensity to it. He doesn’t want to think about what it would’ve been like had he grown up when Mabeuf did.

 

“I never see people as old as you,” he says, in a purposefully light tone. “Not trans people. Not queer people.” It’s only then that he realises he’s drunk half the tea and most of the pastry.

 

Mabeuf laughs and the loudness of it surprises both of them, it seems. He’s not a man who takes up a lot of space, really. He’s large but his presence is gentle and soft, a sort of daydream whisper. It’s the surroundings which really show his personality – the cats, the plants cascading towards the light, the bright clean furnishings, the neat books everywhere. But his words are always weighty, dreamlike but weighty.

 

“It wasn’t always easy, of course. It isn’t easy for you.” He pauses and pets the ginger cat sitting proudly on his lap until it grins smugly at Montparnasse. “But you can manage.”

 

“For a while, perhaps.”

 

“Forever, I hope. You can always come and visit me, Montparnasse.” Mabeuf’s eyes twitch. “If your friends ask, you can always tell them you’re conning me.”

 

“I might,” Montparnasse says, voice shuddering. He realises he’s finished the grizzada, and stands up to leave, nodding to Mabeuf on the way out.

 

He allows the ginger cat exactly one stroke, wrinkles, then turns away.

 

Mabeuf laughs again, dew-softly, and treads away to open up the bookshop for the day. If in future Montparnasse visits again, if Mabeuf collects his stories too and keeps them safely away behind the black of his eyes, if they look after each other for a little while or a long while, then that's their business. Mabeuf wishes upon stars and dandelions and books for Montparnasse's safety, and for the most part it works.


End file.
